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Tuesday, December 24, 2013

What is “Safety”? – Part 2 (Holiday Edition)

People
aren’t used to giving praise for reliability. Since they see nothing when
reliability is accomplished, they assume that it is easier to achieve
reliability than in fact is true. As a result, the public ignores those who are
most successful at achieving reliability and gives them few incentives to
continue in their uneventful ways. – Karl Weick

We love the quote above because it contains so much truth.
Substitute the word “safety” for “reliability” and read it again. In one of our
previous blogs we spoke about a different definition for safety and the
need to stop defining safety based on what doesn’t happen
(accidents/incidents). As Karl Weick also said, safety (or “reliability, to use
his term) is a “dynamic non-event.” Safety is a whole of things happen to
ensure that the bad things don’t happen.

When you start to look at safety that way some interesting
implications come to light. For example, first of all, if safety is about what
is happening then that should change the focus of the safety profession. We
often spend a lot of time being reactive, focusing on that one time when things
went wrong. But most of the time things don’t go wrong. Is it possible that if
we analyze the 9,999 out of 10,000 times things don’t go wrong (i.e. we have an
accident) that we might learn some interesting things about what creates safety
on a daily basis?

But that discussion we’ll leave for another day. What the
above quote means to us today during this holiday season is that there is a
whole lot going on to make our lives better that goes unnoticed. So, this
holiday, take a moment to think about those people out there who are going the
extra mile to make us safer – the unsung heroes who do their inspections thoroughly
every day or who resist the intense pressures to rush to increase productivity
in order to ensure that the job is done safely. Think of all the countless
lives that have been saved. Think of all the people who get to go to work each
day because their businesses weren’t shut down due to accidents, disasters, or
regulatory citations. Take a moment to thank them for what they do every day to
make safety a “dynamic non-event.”

And if you’re one of those people out there making the world
a safer place for us – from all of us at SCM, thank you! You deserve so much
more recognition than you get.